June 19, 2016

Ten practical tips for improving governance in a school as well as ten useful tools. School councils use the ten tips to test how far they live up to these practices and to develop practical actions for improvements.

We wish to thank the many principals, teachers, parents, students, community members and personnel in Victoria's Department of Education and Training and Victorian Public Sector Commission for their input into this list.

In proposing a model of school collaboration, the authors observe that:

All schools should be involved in focused, productive networks within which leaders, teachers and students challenge, support, innovate and learn from one another in ways that measurably improve outcomes

The ‘job description’ of a successful leader includes being an exceptional networker and connector of people, with the ability to broker constructive relationships where none looked possible

The partnership should go beyond relationships between school leaders to really engage with students, teachers, families and communities, including listening to the student and parent voice and the engagement of governors and community groups.

The authors challenge several assumptions that have historically underpinned the organisation of education and schooling and suggest that:

A personalised education system, designed around the needs, interests and aspirations of each learner, taps into the resources that exist in the school, the wider community and within personalised learning networks

The full personalisation of learning is possible only if diverse and multiple sites of expertise and learning outside the school walls are harnessed in new ways.

3.Innovating pedagogy. The series of Open University reports (from 2012 to 2015) exploring new forms of teaching, learning and assessment for an interactive world.

Providing insights into how teaching, learning, digital tools and networks are co-evolving, particularly through personalised and seamless learning (across locations, times, technologies and social settings), among the big themes in the series are:

Scale such as crowd learning and massive open social learning

Connectivity such as seamless learning, the flipped classroom, bring your own devices and crossover learning

In examining the pivotal role of collaboration in lifting student achievement as well as setting out an agenda for systemic change, Bentley & Cazaly:

Discuss the problem of student, family, home and community factors and influences that support student success in school, learning and life being separated from school factors, a separation constraining better outcomes

Define seven key features of collaboration for learning that serve to explain the positive impact of collaboration

Discuss ‘local learning systems’ that translate connections and resources into concrete actions and ‘open access networks’ that provide schools with the opportunity to join wider networks such as science and maths schools, the Great Schools Network and networks run by universities.

Carter & Patterson identify twelve building blocks that can assist in our understanding of successful school learning networks and what they look like in practice. These building blocks cohere interactively around:

The network applies the concept of ‘collaborative autonomy’ – education organisations working and learning together with a shared purpose while retaining a sense of autonomy and uniqueness – and strives to:

Place students at the centre of everything that the Learning Community does

Build strong relationships between education organisations, between education and the broader community and between the Learning Community and key stakeholder groups.

In this analysis of the ‘Learning and Change Network’ initiative in New Zealand, involving networks of students, parents, teachers and community members from multiple schools, McKibben considers various practices including:

Viewing the scope of learning as an ‘ecology’ of opportunities, of which those that happen within school are vitally important but not the only one

Drawing on the productive elements of competition while simultaneously striving for the productive elements of collaboration

Focusing on the strengths that students and families bring to the table, shifting away from learning deficits to amplifying learning strengths while still addressing learning needs.

The Nathalia Learning Community uses the concept of 'collaborative autonomy' – education organisations working and learning together with a shared purpose and common aims and objectives while retaining a sense of autonomy and uniqueness. It strives to:

Place students at the centre of everything that the community does

Build strong relationships between education organisations, between education and the broader community and between the Learning Community and key stakeholder groups

Build a strong, resilient and sustainable 0-18+ years learning environment

Develop and maintain a profile of education leaders in shared education provision.

Provides many insights that are relevant to all schools. For more information, contact Phil Brown, Executive Officer, Country Education Partnership, at

Continuously improving practice and systems through cycles of collaborative inquiry

Using deliberate leadership and skilled facilitation within flat power structures

Frequently interacting and learning inwards

Connecting outwards to learn from others

Forming new partnerships among students, teachers, families, and communities

Securing adequate resources to sustain the work.

How "new partnerships among students, teachers, families, and communities" are supported and promoted, through diverse networks, is crucial. The two halves of ‘within school’ and ‘beyond school’ factors and influences, if brought together in new ways, can lead to much better outcomes for all.